On April 5, Amy Murrell Taylor, a 2001 graduate of our History PhD program, was awarded both the "Avery Craven Award" and the "Merle Curti Social History Award" at this year's Oraganization of American Historians conference held this year in Philadelphia. The awards were both for her new book, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), which is a study of the many thousands of men, women, and children who fled slavery and sought refuge behind the lines of the Union army during the American Civil War. In it, Taylor explores how their day-to-day experiences in military-supervised camps shaped the way Emancipation unfolded in the United States. Please visit the OAH's website for more details.
On April 23, Taylor also won the Society of Civil War Historians' presitigious Tom Watson Brown Book Prize. From the Society's website:
"The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Amy Murrell Taylor is the recipient of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Taylor, Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, earned the award for Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps which was published in 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of the broadcaster, philanthropist, and Civil War enthusiast Tom Watson Brown. In making its selection, the prize committee praised Taylor for her “original, nuanced view of slave refugee camps and the relationship of the US Army to the process of emancipation.” Offering a “detailed spatial analysis of the camps” along with compelling stories “about the fate of so-called contraband slaves”, Embattled Freedom, the prize committee explains, “is one of the very best books written in the field of Civil War studies in the last decade and perhaps longer than that.”